Mitigation of vibrations in high-speed railway cuttings using expanded-polystyrene blocks

Abstract

Over the last years, a rapid growth of high-speed railways (HSR) has been observed in many countries. Due to the increased operational speed, a major side-effect of this growth is the high levels of imposed traffic-induced vibrations by high-speed trains (HST). Hence, when HSR are cited or planned to be constructed near to “sensitive” structures (e.g., hospitals, schools, etc.), the users/residents of these buildings will probably be affected by these vibrations, as well as the noise of continuously passing HST. For this reason, during the design and construction of new HSR or the upgrading of existing ones, the vibration levels should be minimized. In this study, the mitigation of the low-frequency vibrations induced by the HST passage in the case of HSR cuttings is studied. A new mitigation approach, i.e., the application of expanded polystyrene (EPS) blocks at the cutting slopes, has been investigated in order to reduce the levels of vibrations. The efficiency of this measure has been investigated via advanced three-dimensional numerical simulations. The retrofitted models have been compared with a typical cutting without any mitigation measures in Paris-Brussels line in Belgium. For this site, pre-available field measurements have been used to validate the developed computational models. The presented results illustrate that EPS consists an efficient solution for the mitigation of HST-ground vibrations in HSR cuttings.